Object recognition and identification are well-known problems in the areas of computer vision, computer graphics and artificial intelligence. Typically, a computer is given the task of identifying an object within a given image. The image may be taken of a scene and a context may be imputed—explicitly or implicitly—to the image and/or scene. This is something that humans do readily; but which computers are currently less successful than humans.
In the field of security, there are attempts to automate the recognition of objects of interest within images by law enforcement or other governmental agencies. For example, the automated identification of humans, containers, cars or the like could be very helpful to such agencies—where the number of real-time and recorded images have increased with the number of cameras or other image capture devices placed in high security areas.
Other fields of business are interested in a solution to the automatic identification of objects for various reasons—e.g., an inventory system keeping track of particular objects within a given vicinity or the like.